The Culinary Newsletter’s Golden Age 1980-2000

Just a few of the culinary newsletters published in the 1980s and 90s

What glorious decades the 1980s and 1990s were for those of us English speakers with an intellectual interest in food.

What fascinated us was the history of food, the food of everyday people, where it came from, how it was made, and how it was eaten. We enjoyed poking around in small groceries and store front restaurants, identifying ingredients unknown to us, tracing hitherto unsuspected links between foods in different parts of the world, figuring out how baking, fermenting, and other basic techniques worked, puzzling over strange implements and pots, and scouring second hand bookstores for interesting cookbooks.

Although some overlap existed, our world was not that of the aspirational cooking of the glossy magazines (which has largely been taken over by chef culture), nor the earnest early efforts to reform the food system associated with the counter culture (which was later institutionalized as Food Studies), nor yet the purist quest for a fresh natural Mediterranean diet that spread from northern California and merged with the Slow Food Movement.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because Francesco D’Ausilio asked on Twitter about food magazines in the 1980s and what they could teach us. I replied that besides the big mass market glossies, there was a flowering of small culinary newsletters that he might want to consult for a different perspective.

Francesco’s question led me to get my collection of culinary newsletters down from a high shelf and organize them. I’d forgotten just how many there were. And how interesting and well-informed many were. And how they linked a loose coalition of enthusiasts across the English-speaking world.

What follows mainly concerns the newsletters that were concerned with the culture and history of food. Those that concentrated on recipes, cooking competitions, mail order foods, or even how to write a culinary newsletter I have left to one side. This article from the Washington Post in 1996 estimates there were 60 newsletters in circulation (thanks to Sharon Nimitz whose newsletter was Cook/Speak). That was probably an underestimate, given fugitive life of many of them.

The Political and Technological Background to Culinary Newsletters

Politically, the background was different in the United States and Britain. In the US, the effects of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration and Nationalization Act that abolished national quotas were now very visible in the store front restaurants and grocery stores of American cities. In Britain, too, there was immigration from the former Empire as well as many individuals who maintained connections and turned to food as a way to understand their time in the Gulf, in Southeast Asia, in West Africa, or in the Mediterranean. In Australia and other parts of the English-speaking world, I am not sure what was going on.

Technologically, it was computers and the internet that made all the difference. Word Perfect, the first really good personal word processing program, was available by the mid 1980s, meaning that anyone could put together a fairly professional-looking newsletter.  Email from the early 1990s meant that many of us could communicate in person and not have to wait for the mail.

Edit to include this comment from Don Lindgren of Rabelais Books. Many thanks to him for ever-so-gently correcting my assumption that culinary newsletters were a product of word processing. They have a long history before that and I’d love to know more.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the thesis – that it was a “golden age” or perhaps I need some clarification as to why it might be a “golden age”. If we are to understand that the 80s and 90s were a great moment because of the sheer number of culinary newsletters published, we would be wrong. Lists of culinary periodicals of a similar length and breadth can be produced for most decades. If the years in question are seen as notable because they produced a flurry of truly useful periodicals, I wonder if this is a reflection of their usefulness to “us”, meaning Rachel’s readers, a self-selecting group all from more or less the same generation or two. Other decades would produce periodicals useful to “them”; not better or worse, just the audience of the moment. I think these two decades are important because ALL of the decades of culinary periodicals are important, and because these periodicals came before those of the last two decades, decades in which the new periodicals were often thin of content, heavy on slick design, and expensive (not to mention occasionally completely baffling).

I disagree, politely, with the idea that word processing suddenly made the newsletter more possible. I think it made it possible to look a bit more polished (though that is in the eye of the beholder). The technology for small batch printing has been possible since the 1890s due to various duplicator technologies, including mimeo, ditto, and later copier technologies. And these technologies were used, a lot, especially in the cooking world. Producers of community cookbooks were using them (and using them creatively) as early as the 1910s. So cheap, easy printing was available. I do agree that the internet, with blogs, websites, and the aggregator sites like Chowhound and eGullet, spelled the end for newsletters and some smaller magazines. Now it was no longer necessary to make the trip to the post office with envelopes filled with newsletters.

By the early 21st century, although interest in how everyday foods worked around the world, the day of the culinary newsletter was over. In 2001, e-Gullet started. It was not the first on-line food chat site–that was Chowhound started in 1997–but it quickly became the liveliest for the food intelligentsia.  Simultaneously, food blogging was getting under way. Although a few print culinary newsletters survived or turned into regular magazines, most went out of existence.

The Wider World in which Culinary Newsletters Flourished

Culinary newsletters were part of a wider world of thinking about food at the time.

They had some overlap with anthropological and biological studies of food around the world.

There was some overlap with a growing market for “definitive” and “authentic” cookbooks of different countries. Here Judith Jones at Knopf was key, publishing not only Julia Child, but Marcella Hazan, Claudia Roden, Irene Kuo, and Madhur Jaffrey. These cookbooks paid less attention to cultural context than the newsletters and both authors and audience were more oriented to upper middle class cuisine.

Food entrepreneurs, often from the counter culture, had similar interests. I still treasure Ari Weinzweig’s Guide to Good Olive Oil (1995). Ari with Paul Saginaw founded Zingermans in Ann Arbor in the mid 1982, which has remained a Mecca for the food sleuths.

Closer were journalists and other writers who found ways of publishing about the food cultures around them. Jonathan Gold (greatly lamented) began writing his Counter Intelligence column in the Los Angeles Weekly in 1986, later continuing with his observations at the LA Times. Cara de Silva wrote a column Flavor of the Neighborhood for New York Newsday from 1987-1995. John Egerton published his classic Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, in History in 1987. His descriptions of hundreds of homey southern restaurants really helped me when I lived in southwest Virginia. When I moved to Hawaii I discovered his son, March Egerton, had a great book, Adventures in Cheap Eating: Hawaii on the small restaurants of the Islands.  And I would put my exploration of the Local Food of Hawaii, The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage (1996)–until then scoffed at if recognized at all outside the Islands–squarely in this tradition.

Closest of all were the Culinary Historians groups in New York, Boston, Ann Arbor, Houston, and Los Angeles and the like-minded but more international group that attended the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, which after some initial trial events, began in earnest in 1981.  Contacts were constant between these groups.

What Did Culinary Newsletters Achieve?

1. Culinary newsletters built a community. That sounds corny to say but at the time it was an extraordinary sense of shared interest and excitement. There was so much to be discovered. Almost everywhere you looked, whether in the food of the English-speaking world or outside it, there was some intriguing puzzle or problem. You quickly established a network of fellows that stretched from Norway to the Philippines, from Spain to Nigeria. Cooperation, not competition, was very much the spirit of the time. To this day, many of my best friends and closest colleagues come out of the networks of culinary newsletters.
2. They offered somewhere to publish and to be reviewed. Today when every university press worth its name has a food list and when academic journals review books on food history, sociology and anthropology that does not sound like much. At the time, though, getting this kind of material published in any kind of scholarly-reputable way was really hard.  So was getting your work reviewed by competent people. This was a self-policing community where insight and research footwork were quickly recognized.
3. They fed back into the larger food world. Russ Parsons, who for twenty years edited the excellent food section of the LATimes, wrote to say “Under Ruth Reichl’s direction, our food section was patterned much more on newsletters than on traditional newspapering.”  The Southern Foodways Alliance, the most active group working on the documentation of everyday American food, grew out of Egerton’s work. Many of the larger university culinary library collections (Michigan, Schlesinger) owed much to the groups surrounding culinary newsletters, as did university programs at Boston University, New York University, and elsewhere, and journals. Not to mention the outpouring of books and articles on food in the past twenty years.

Guides to Food Newsletters

I haven’t found much. Check out the section on periodicals in Gary Allen’s Resource Guide for Food Writers (1999). The Schlesinger Library, Guide to Culinary Magazines and Newsletters lists a small selection.

Edit.

Just thrilled that this post hit a chord with so many colleagues from this period. Two thoughts. First, most commentators agree that this was not a California to the world story. Second, it will be ungainly but I am trying gradually to incorporate comments from the likes of Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Russ Parsons, Cara de Silva who were so active and whose perspectives enrich this story. Bear with me as I do this.

Chronological List of Food Newsletters

1973–. The Wine and Food Library Catalogue

Not a newsletter but an antiquarian cookbook catalogue Jan Bluestein Longone mailed out for years to eager buyers from Ann Arbor, Michigan. It almost qualifies, though, because of Jan’s erudite comments on many of the books. Jan and Dan were also central to the Ann Arbor Culinary Historians, still active today. As the link above shows, Jan’s collection later formed the core of the superb culinary research collection at the University of Michigan that bears her name.

1976. Foodtalk: The Newsletter for People Who Enjoy Food for the Mind as Well as the Table.

Elaine Douglas Cahn edited this from California, giving in 1989 a report of her culinary travels in Turkey, an essay on cowboy food in west Texas, another on the diner, and a report on a food writers’ workshop.

1978. The Digest: A Newsletter for the Interdisciplinary Study of Food.

First issue typewritten, report on a talk by anthropologist Mary Douglas, publications of interest, historical essays, by the Foodways Group of the University of Pennsylvania. Become a full fledged journal under the editorship of Yvonne R. Lockwood and William G. Lockwood and later Lucy Long.  Essays in 1995 on ramen noodles and Spam, metabolising Judaism, Koulourákia, Bible breads.

1979.  Simple Cooking.

Written by John Thorne.  Here’s what Ed Behr of The Art of Eating (see below) has to say about John.

“John Thorne is frequently seen as a stubborn and recalcitrant food writer. He ignores the bright world of food trends, he doesn’t hesitate to offer criticism where he thinks it’s due, and he sticks to the narrow focus of his kitchen and table. For more than 30 years, he has been writing about food, impeccably, in his food letter Simple Cooking and in books. He’s a private person who chose a public medium: writing about the way he cooks and eats. As he explained in his first book, he proselytizes for better home cooking. He likes his readers, but he doesn’t try to ingratiate himself with them — they haven’t shaped him.

His subject is everyday cooking, and the dishes he zeros in on tend to be homey — mostly American, French, or Italian, although over time more have come from farther off, such as, in this issue, akara, black-eyed pea fritters from Africa. He has a strong sense of what a dish should be and what he wants from it. If you want to understand something and he has written about it, you’d be foolish not to read what he has to say. The closer he is to a dish, the better. Maine chowder, for example — fish, clam, or corn: “Ideally, one learns how to make it not from a recipe but from a communal pooling of experience and opinion.” You don’t need to uncover that community, though; John has found it for you. . . .

Among a certain set of cognoscenti, John’s work is recognized as transcendently good. As I write, he has completed a new issue of Simple Cooking after a long pause. When one day he ceases publication, it will leave a hole in the world of food. Although he surely would reject the word, John is one of the pure. He knows exactly what interests him and, in the most positive way, he has never moved an inch.”

John’s writing appeared as a series of books, beginning with Simple Cooking in 1996. You might want to get your hands on one or more of them.

1980. Culinary Historians of Boston Newsletter

The Culinary Historians of Boston were spearheaded by Barbara Haber, who as Curator of Books at the Schlesinger Library created their fine culinary collection besides being a fine historian and speaker; Barbara Wheaton, who besides cooking peacocks and writing a serious study of the evolution of French cooking, Savoring the Past (1983), has trained countless food historians in how to read a cookbook; and Joyce Toomre, who edited and translated Elena Molokhovets, the classic Russian cookbook of the nineteenth century. I owe all three of them, as so many others on this post, a huge debt of gratitude.

Pulled at random, the Newsletter for 1955 has reports on Andrew F. Smith’s talk on The Tomato in America, Kyri Claflin on The Commission for Relief in Belgium, as well as book reviews and member profiles.

1981. Ciao: The Definitive Italian Food Newsletter

Written by Nancy Radke who for 25 years she directed the U.S. Information Office of Parmigiano-Reggiano, the original parmesan cheese.  Her husbad was Dean of Humanities at Syracuse University.

1979–. Petits Propos Culinaires

The modified second impression of the first edition and the most recent edition. Originally put together on a lark by Alan Davidson, Elizabeth David and others to raise money for the British Royal National Lifeboat Institution, this little magazine is still going strong.

For years it was edited by former British diplomat, co-founder of the Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery, prolific author of books on the world’s seafood and ways of cooking it, and hard-working eccentric Alan Davidson. Almost everyone working on food and food history during this period knew Alan and had been helped by him in some way.

Then the editorship went to Tom Jaine, former restaurant owner, editor of Prospect Books, and author of wonderful, ironic, literate introductions and reviews, enough in themselves to make it worth subscribing to PPC.

PPC is full of articles that seem at first sight to be extraordinarily recherché but that put together have done wonders to illuminate the world’s food history. Here is a sample pulled from No. 55 (1997): “On Aphrodisiacs,” “The Colonial Kitchen of the Dutch in Java,” “The Wondrous Sandwich,” “Desert Truffles (fungi found in Iran and Iraq), “Trakhanas Revisited (Middle Eastern grain products), “Army Worms” (early 20th century report on insects eaten by the Pomo Indians of California), plus reviews.

ca. 1982 Jottings from the Dean

A delightful small newsletter from Mike and Tessa McKirdy to accompany their catalog Cooks Books that they issued three or four times a year. Thanks to Dan Strehl, expert on the cookbooks of California among many other skills, for sending this along.

1984-1991. Journal of Gastronomy

A magazine published by the American Institute of Food and Wine, founded by Robert Mondavi and Julia Child in 1981. Although this organization still exists and sponsors, for example, culinary collections at UCSan Diego and the Radcliffe Institute, it does not have the visibility that it did in the 1980s.  It carried articles by major food writers and historians such as Betty Fussell.  Membership was by my standards at the time pretty expensive so I never joined, hence no photo.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins, who edited the Journal of Gastronomy for much of its life, sent this comment. I want to apologize to her for giving her role short shrift.

“As the editor of The Journal of Gastronomy throughout most of its history, I fought hard to allow wider distribution but I was battling the forces of California wine makers who held the purse strings for the American Institute of Wine & Food. Although survey after survey showed that the chief benefit of membership in the AIWF was the Journal, the powers that controlled the money continued to underfund it, almost always failing to pay the printer’s and designer’s bills on time. It was an uphill struggle. I wanted to give it a more general distribution (at the very least, make it available in culinary book shops) and possibly to take on advertising of the most discreet and well-mannered sort. Such was not to be and the publication eventually met its demise and I left to help form Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust with the late Dun Gifford and Greg Drescher, now in a leading position at the Culinary Institute of America.
I mention all this because I think some recognition is due me for single-handedly producing, against great odds, the only national publication devoted to the serious business of food. It was a distinguished piece of work and published a great deal more than Betty Fussell, including serious scholars and historians like Sidney Mintz and Rudolf Grewe, among many others. Darra Goldstein picked up the pieces with her Gastronomica but I’m sure she would say that she had initially a great deal of help, encouragement and advice from me.
Another correction: Although the culinary collection that was divided between the University of California at San Diego and Radcliffe came from the AIWF (largely engineered by Dun Gifford), in no sense does the Institute continue to “sponsor” these collections.”

And from Cara de Silva.

Thanks for writing this, Rachel. Such a wonderful, evocative, and informative piece. (And thanks, too, for including my column.) You request comments. Well I have only been able to do a quick read, since I am just home from away. However, from that once through I would say, beyond the huzzahs, of course, that I think the Journal of Gastronomy is, perhaps, given short shrift here because you didn’t subscribe. Yes, it was expensive. Too expensive. But for me, under Nancy Harmon Jenkins and Robert Clark, it was one of the most worthwhile publications around, indeed one of those that best embodied this so heady time. Good to great writing, fine editing, and, most often, riveting subject matter. I just loved it.

1984.  Ann Arbor Culinary Historians

I’m not sure who first edited this, but it came from the circle surrounding the Longones in Ann Arbor. Morphs into Repast in 1987 and is still going strong with excellent research-level articles on food history.

1986. News from the Beard House

Reviews of what was going on in the food world, including newsletters. At some point morphs into their blog.

1986. The Art of Eating

“The Art of Eating first appeared in 1986 in the form of an eight-page black-and-white newsletter written by Edward Behr. After three decades in print, it grew into a digital-only magazine with subscribers and contributors around the world. There is no advertising. 

1987. World of Cookbooks: The International Cookbook Newsletter

1988. Gochiso-sama!  Gourmet Newsletter in English About Japan

“Lucy Seligman’s love affair with Japan started when she was 15, when she ended up visiting Japan for the summer. She studied Japanese in Hiroshima, stayed in Tokyo’s Olympic village and lived with a Japanese family in Okayama. Returning to the States, she told her family that she wanted to go back to Japan and it would be her major in college. No one believed her! And yet, that’s exactly what happened. She spent her junior year abroad in Tokyo, attending Waseda University and living with the Mitsui family. She was their 21st foreign daughter. She got her degree from USC in Japanese and Japanese culture. Eventually, she married a Japanese national and ended up living in both Tokyo and Nagoya. In total, she has lived over 13 years in Japan. It remains her second home.

Her culinary life in Japan included being a restaurant critic, a food historian and writer, the editor of Gochiso-sama!—her culinary newsletter on Japanese cuisine, and the owner of her own cooking school, Lucy’s Kitchen. Her newsletter at some point morphed into a website and blog, Thanks for the Meal.”

1989-2009. Food History News

Sandra Oliver, author of a number of books on American food history, including the magisterial Salt Water Foodways (1970) edited this for twenty years. Sandy has always been mainly interested in the history of American food and the back issues are a treasure trove. The one illustrated here has an article by Leni Sorensen on the food of the slaves at Monticello, now of course a hot button topic but then a pioneering study.

1990–2007. Radcliffe Culinary Times

1992.  Dreaded Broccoli: Enjoying the Food You Know You Should Eat

Barbara and Tamar Haspel edited a quarterly newsletter that resulted in a cookbook, The Dreaded Broccoli.  It’s a bit of an outlier here but I include it because if you follow American food journalism, yes, that is the @tamarhaspel who writes such trenchant articles on American agriculture for the Washington Post.

1993. The Curmudgeon’s Home Companion

1993–. Flavor & Fortune: Dedicated to the Art and Science of Chinese Cuisine

Edited throughout by the inimitable Jacqueline M. Newman, nutritionist, Chinese cookbook collector, and author of books on Chinese food, Flavor and Fortune has essays on Chinese ingredients, recipes, book reviews, and restaurant reviews. Most are written by Newman but some are contributed. Particularly strong on the cuisines of China’s many ethnic minorities.

1994. Food for Thought. Houston Culinary Historians’ Newsletter

The Houston Culinary Historians were led by people such as Cathleen Baird, curator of the Hilton Collection at the University of Houston and Alice and Rob Arndt. Alice was editor of the pioneering Culinary Biographies  and as editor for many years of AramcoWorld, Rob published many fine essays on foods of the Islamic world and their influence elsewhere.

1994. Word of Mouth: Food and the Written Word

Johan Mathiesen, like several others associated with the culinary newsletter movement, sold antiquarian books on food. Proud of his Norwegian heritage, Johan refused to eat in any restaurant the staff could not also afford to eat in. His knowledgeable, well-written, no-holds barred newsletter punctuating pretension in the culinary world. This one deals with the spread of the longaniza sausage. He stopped selling books, became increasingly absorbed in cemeteries in Oregon history, and has now disappeared from (my) view.

1995 Convivium: A Decidedly Unstuffy Food and Cooking Letter

1996–2000. The Asian Foodbookery: A Quarterly Exploration of Asian Foods and Foodways Everywhere

Robert Lucky, his wife, and later child, took a series of teaching jobs across Asia. He reports on food experiences, excerpts earlier travelers, and offers incisive reviews of Asian cookbooks appearing across the English-speaking world.

1997-2018. Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink, Adelaide University, Australia.

Edited for at least part of this time by A. Lynn Martin. Symposia reports, publication opportunities, queries (why does Sri Lankan burgher cuisine use semolina not flour?), book reviews.

2001. Gastronomica

Darra Goldstein’s extraordinary contribution to the food world, a real beautiful, serious magazine with the backing of the University of California Press. The way had been prepared by all these newsletters but Gastronomica reached a whole new level. Now sadly diminished.

Concluding thoughts

1.  Were there parallels outside the English-speaking world?
2.   Comments and corrections, please!
3. Who wants to put these on line? What libraries would like to create a collection?

And finally, do go and look at Don Lindgren’s wonderful album of seventy five different culinary journal, newsletter, and periodical covers.

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